A German court has ruled against the family of Tron—the deceased hacker whose …

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A popular prayer begins "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Reasonable advice, whether you believe in a hereafter or not, but especially pertinent in the case of Friedrich Kurz—father of the deceased German hacker colloquially known as "Tron." Mr. Kurz apparently does not know the difference, as he has been waging war against Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.'s wikipedia.de web site, with the goal of having his son's real name stricken from its content.

In case you haven't been following the story, Tron's unfortunate tale should probably have ended with his death back in October 1998, when he was found hanged in a Berlin park under mysterious circumstances. Though officially ruled a suicide, his family believes that Tron was instead the victim of foul play.

Flash forward to 2005, when an article about Tron appeared on the wikipedia.de site. His family discovered the article, then sued to have it removed, citing a German privacy statute. Last month, a German court agreed that wikipedia.de should be taken down until the Tron article could be removed. This is where we begin to see that much of the current legal wrangling over Tron's name revolves around a spectacular misunderstanding of the Internet and how it works.

First, wikipedia.de is not the German-language version of Wikipedia. It is an entry site—owned by a German company—which redirects to de.wikipedia.org, which is the German-language version of Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself—German version included—is based in the US, where the court ordering the removal has no jurisdiction. Therefore, the court's order to take down the article from wikipedia.de was nonsense, because that site never actually had it in the first place.

Second, the German-language site that did (and continues to) display the article, de.wikipedia.org, never took the article down because as an American web site it didn't have to, and through all of this, de.wikipedia.org has been accessible in Germany on an uninterrupted basis.

Third, if the German court had somehow managed to lock down both German-language versions of Wikipedia, the English-language version of the site also contains an article on Tron, lists his real name, and is fully available in Germany, where many people speak English as a second language.

Finally, even if the German court had figured out a way to get any and all versions of Wikipedia to remove any and all references to Tron, Wikipedia's very nature (for good or ill) allows users to add the information back in, either directly by adding another Tron article, or obliquely by referencing him in other articles, and that doesn't even begin to count the 22,300 references to Tron's real name found on Google as of this writing.

In a nutshell, this is the true beauty and power of the 'Net. A recent movie used the tagline "Can't stop the signal," and that is precisely the case once information spreads across the Web. It's the reason that the Internet has the potential to be one of the greatest single forces for freedom and democracy in the history of the world, and it's the reason that Mr. Kurz' legal war is an exercise in futility.

I can certainly sympathize with Mr. Kurz' desire to let his son rest in whatever peace is available to him. He probably deserves that, but trying to hide Tron's real name from the public at this point is like trying to filter Niagara Falls with a dish towel. This week, a different German court reversed the earlier misguided decision and rejected the Kurz law suit, though no reasons were released. Perhaps the court finally figured out what the rest of us already knew, and Mr. Kurz has yet to learn.